He would and has argued that his ‘New Politics’ can only triumph with a strong Conservative majority and would be held back by coalition politics

This is pretty much a mirror image of what we on the Labour left almost all used to argue up until the penny dropped and we realised just how few voters really supported us.

And talk about glass houses and throwing stones – it was Tony Blair who reneged on a clear commitment to introduce PR in his first parliament, and Gordon who has just taken it off the agenda for what may well be another generation by ruling out a referendum on election day.

Again the Tories may be wrong but that doesn’t mean they are inconsistent on this issue.

You and I and Paul Krugman may call ourselves Keynesians these days, but the fact is that for three decades academic economic departments have been dominated by various strands of classical, monetarist, Austrian and rational choice theorists – who even if they disagreed on much else all denied that Keynesianism was the only path to macro-economic success.

Cameron recieved whatever education he got in economics at precisely the point that this new orthodoxy was established and has spent his entire adult life in the more or less exclusive company of people for whom Keynesian is an insult.

His beliefs may be profoundly wrong but he’s not necessarily dishonest or inconsistent.

It took me 3 minutes to google up the national debt figures for the past 5 years:

Net Debt £bn
2003/4 381.5
2004/5 422.1
2005/6 461.6
2006/7 497.9
2007/8 526.9
2008/9 609.5

However this excludes financial sector interventions (which at least at the time the Tories supported), include them in and you get:

2003/4 381.5
2004/5 422.1
2005/6 461.6
2006/7 497.9
2007/8 621.2
2008/9 743.7

And if you take the most recent monthly net debt figure for August 2009 you get £804.8bn.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/psf0909.pdf

A rise from £381.5bn at March 31 2004 to £743.7bn at March 31 2009 is indeed as near as dammit double.

I haven’t got a figure for August 2004 to hand but it would have been c.400bn so I’d guess that between then and August 2009 has almost certainly more than doubled.

So Cameron is technically right.

But why the hell are we quibbling over this at all – the size of the national debt is irrelevant if we get the economy growing again.
`
Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home and Wilson all handled much higher rates of national debt compared to GDP and delivered three decades of sustained growth.

Compassionate centrist – I’ll admit that it wasn’t our best rebuttal but we did 29 and so some were bound to be more discursive than others. But the point remains, the “broken Britain” narrative ignores the facts about crime reduction and poverty alleviation by conflating a persistent 30-year problem into something apparently created in the last decade.

Fayeez – Obama certainly wasnt the first person to invoke a “steep climb” but it was definitely the most memorable in recent history. My guess is that Cameron was quite self-consciously copying Obama in what you might call an attempt to sub-consciously associate himself with a popular figure.

Judy – very good question and one worth looking into. We’ll get onto it.

The line about every school being as good as Eton is just so insultingly coy and meaningless, it’s a miracle that an intelligent man actually allowed the words to pass from his lips.

And Tories, champion of the poor… laughable.

Opposed Minimum wage, oppose tax credits, oppose the job creation programmes and re-skilling programmes that were a part of Labour’s spending our way out of recession, it takes more than just warm words.

All in all, an amazingly uninspiring speech from someone who can at least do presentation well normally, makes you wonder if it’s all getting a little bit real for him.

GAME ON!!

But society’s problems go back way before the Labour Government.”

What an absolute kop-out of a rebuttal, that’s akin to saying “you started it, not us”. If you truly want to solve issues you have to recognise they exist, which Cameron did here, and outlined a way to tackle them.